A lesson learned from THE HOLOCAUST: A NEW HISTORY, by Laurence Rees

 Hatred and intolerance is a disease that only destroys.

    Prior to catching up with Laurence Rees' amazing 2017 book The Holocaust: A New History, it had been a good 15 years or so since I had read a book solely devoted to the topic of Nazi Germany and/or the atrocities committed in its name; there are people who can't get enough of such historical studies, but I find them uniquely dark and terrible works that have the power to depress me indefinitely. Rees' book is a vital work that should absolutely be read by everyone, while at the same time I wouldn't mind taking another 15 years off before I revisit the subject again. There are a variety of serious historical lesson to take away from the crimes of the Holocaust, and all too many people learned the wrong ones from it (one popular modern version: the Holocaust was a uniquely horrible and unforgivable historical crime [which is definitely true on some levels], and that means no other crimes could ever be compared to it, thus modern genocidal-level events are naturally more minor by comparison). Actually, one element of the background to the Holocaust that Rees goes into feels all too familiar to our modern world: people find themselves suffering from global events they do not understand and have no control over; firebrand politicians craft a message to those people that what's happening to them is not their fault, and they have solutions to fix it; and part of those solutions involves targeting the people who are ACTUALLY to blame, and punishing them for their supposed crimes.

    That was the background of many a Nazi politician, many of whom saw Germany lose World War I, and not wanting to admit their own nation's failures were to blame, reached the assumption that outside immigrant groups were the ones who had betrayed and destroyed Germany. Much of this hatred had been fueled by a refugee crisis of Jewish groups fleeing a reign of terror inflicted on them by Tsarist Russia; they settled into supposedly tolerant and civilized nations such as Germany and Poland, only to find themselves all-too-easy targets when global events turned against those nations. Adolf Hitler was nothing if not a conspiracy theorist, and at a relatively early age he settled on the narrative that Jews had caused all of the world's problems, even ones as supposedly unrelated as the Western powers inflicting economic pain on Germany (because you see, who really controls those countries?!). Every time I read a book where Hitler makes an appearance, I find him a uniquely bizarre and unpleasant personality, even by the standards of his fellow totalitarians (and any modern apologists who have tried to separate him a bit from the crimes of the Holocaust clearly don't want people to actually read his words; attacking and destroying Jews was often literally ALL he could talk about, on an absolutely exhausting level).  Hitler and the Nazis took advantage of the economic misery of ordinary Germans, by assuring them that outside groups had caused all their problems and only the brutal approaches of the Nazis could solve the nation's problems.

    From an early point, the Nazis dehumanized anyone whom they didn't see as properly German, putting restrictions on Jewish and immigrant groups in an effort to get them to self-deport out of Germany. One key development that Rees talks about a lot that's damning for both the Nazis and their opponents, was the refusal of outside countries to take more Jewish refugees (in the warped world of the Nazis, this justified the eventual extermination camps, on the grounds that no one in the world wanted them anyways). When Hitler's aggressive expansion policies eventually triggered World War II, that left Jews under the mercy of Hitler's brutal SS squads, which took the lead in occupying German conquests and forcing Jews into small ghettos where they could be monitored and controlled by an increasingly unhinged German state. Convincingly, Rees argues that the eventual Holocaust that killed over 10 million people was not a decision that was ordered in one fell swoop by Hitler, but rather a culmination of years of Nazi propaganda that had convinced an entire generation of young German men to view those different from them (notably Jews, but also LGBTQ people, immigrants, homeless, and other various ethnic groups) as lesser beings who were a blight on their nation, who had to be removed from it by any means necessary.

    Rees' book is ugly, depressing, and all too predictable, but it also felt like essential reading. The Holocaust in our modern world has felt less like a unique historical crime that could never be repeated, but rather a dark warning from History about the inevitable consequences of nations blaming others for their failures and lashing out against other groups in a nationalist rage. As the last of the Holocaust survivors die off (I had the privilege of meeting one only recently on a DC trip), it is absolutely vital that we not let these stories and these lessons die, as we watch the cancer of social media allow unsavory characters to spread various hateful propaganda and Holocaust denial narratives.